Why I converted to Christianity

Before I start talking about why I converted to Christianity, older readers may be asking themselves which religion I was “raised with.” It irks me whenever anyone asks this, or even when it comes up during small talk. It’s out of touch. The concept of being “raised as/with a religion” does not resemble anything that is happening in the place I grew up in. I don’t know anyone who was raised as any religion. Older people still talk about this as if it’s happening, because they were raised in a religious environment and they believe they’re passing that on to their kids; but, in reality, they are only passing down the holidays. It’s completely taboo to practice any difficult customs or even just to hold beliefs that are consistent with your supposed religion. Kids understand this, and they see that their religion has no bearing on how their family behaves, so they don’t take it seriously. They ask “what religion is your family” only as a shorthand for “do you do Christmas or Hanukkah;” they know there is nothing deeper to it than that. The answer to the question you guys are attempting to ask is that I did both holidays because I was raised in a broken home. But if I take the question at face value, the answer is that I was raised as an atheist, and so was almost every other person in my high school.

It’s important to understand that atheism is our state religion, and no matter what the statistics say, it’s also the dominant religion of Gen Z. I grew up around plenty of Jews, but I only know a single person who actually believes in Judaism. I’ve met a handful of cradle Catholics but none who actually believe in God. If you did actually believe in God, you would develop certain boundaries and standards for other people’s behavior; these would require you to be in rebellion against the dominant ideology of blue America (that being hedonism). If you’re a student, especially in a public school or a college, this means war with your school and every other institution you interact with; none of them will ever respect your beliefs or tolerate any expression of them. Behaving as though God exists is the easiest way to stand out as a weirdo. In fact, having convictions at all and expressing discomfort with certain behaviors is disciplinary “school shooter” behavior. So nobody wants to join the losing side. A superficial glance at society will quickly convince you that God isn’t real; why would God create a world that neglects and scorns Him with zero consequences? Questioning that assumption is the most difficult thing that the son of a well-off liberal household can do. You would be sacrificing your whole life. So if the wide consensus seems to be true, why even try to look deeper?

I didn’t even have anything to lose, and I still refused to give religion a shot. I was already marked as “autistic” because of my nature and I was victimized by psychiatry. Childcare crazies would hunt me for sport. I hated this world and everything it stood for. I was already alt-right by the time I was 11 (I’m more moderate now), merely because I was smart enough to see that the ultra-inclusionist framework I was being raised in was, plainly, fucking bananas! And yet atheism was the one tenet of it that I didn’t bother to question, because that would be too exhausting even for me. It was easier to go the other way and desperately try to rationalize the world by myself. With that said, this post is going to be less about why the current prevailing framework is bad and more about why Christianity is superior to secular alternatives. Obviously, moral relativism is bad; any serious person can agree that some moral framework needs to be in place, or else people can just do anything. Our current state religion teaches otherwise. It teaches that any rule can be broken as long as you can justify that you’re not immediately hurting anyone. It’s ok to have absolutely no loyalty to anybody, to be selfish, to be promiscuous or gluttonous, or to push the boundaries of sexual perversion farther than they’ve ever been pushed. The only thing that’s not ok is to question people’s behavior, because that makes them uncomfortable and we don’t care if there’s a long-term benefit. We can’t pass the Marshmallow Test. 13-year-old girls are put on birth control and 13-year-old boys become girls. If you don’t know why that’s bad, enough time has passed that plenty of those children are now adults who you can ask. Now, I’m going to lay out my best attempt at a secular moral framework, and then I’m going to explain why it sucks and why Christianity is better.

As a child being raised in the aforementioned hellworld, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what was going on. When a person is labeled “autistic,” it is often because they have a rebellious and hardheaded nature, for better or worse. When all the people in my life started trying to convince me that I had to pretend that my friend’s sister was a boy, I wasn’t buying it. I was more upset about it than I’d like to admit. 12-year-old me wasn’t the hero of this story; I was just an angry contrarian teenager. But, in this case, I was clearly correct that the girl wasn’t a boy. The fact that it was so obvious meant that the gaslighting was driving me more insane than usual. The amount of thought I put into this nonsense led to me developing a personal tenet: “it is morally wrong to lie, even if it doesn’t hurt anyone.” I assigned an inherent moral value to the truth. I’m sure I justified it with some stupid bullshit like “what if it comes up on a medical exam in 30 years!?,” but, really, I was just deeply uncomfortable with lying. I would’ve been livid with Plato if I could yet read. So, to recap my mind so far: inherent moral worth is real, truth is one of the things that has it, BUT God still isn’t real and we have to figure out where the other two priors are coming from. An easy cop-out would be to research philosophy, but my only exposure so far had been Descartes, who I was deeply unimpressed with. I can say with hindsight that I wouldn’t have liked Kant either. I wanted a framework that would allow me to say, with 100% certainty, that I was right and that my enemies are immoral. I carved out some things that were “okay” to disagree about (gun control was the big story at the time) and some things that weren’t (whether that chick was a boy or not). But in order to decide why some disagreements were reasonable and others weren’t, I had to construct a Godless model of what would cause people to disagree (or differ from each other in general) at all.

Well, it turns out that when you think about it for more than a few minutes, it is actually impossible to understand why people are different without believing in God. Of course, when I say “understand,” I mean correctly. The correct explanation is that free will comes from God and we each have a divine, immortal, individual soul that cannot be measured or understood. If you don’t believe in God, the only other explanation is that our choices come from factors that do exist in the material world. These include our neurobiology and environmental factors (“nature” and “nurture”). The majority of atheists (admitted or otherwise) just accept that without any further thought. But I was trying to understand why people are evil, so I needed to think a little bit deeper. If you go down that rabbit hole, you pretty quickly figure out that the popular notion of “free will” does not exist. Every choice that’s made has a myriad of causes which can all be measured. You might think that a choice or thought you’ve made or had is “random,” but really, you just don’t know what caused it. Not knowing the cause doesn’t mean that the effect has no cause. The mainstream conception of a “multiverse” that diverges every time a human makes a choice is insanely retarded. The Big Bang set a chain of cause and effect into motion to which everything in the universe, including every individual choice, can be traced. The debate between nature and nurture is laughable because both are predetermined. Your nurture is determined by the natures of the people around you (and those people’s nurtures, ad infinitum). I later found out that millions of other people had also figured this out (since it’s a basic chain of thought and isn’t impressive at all), and that the name for it is determinism.

Under determinism, the reason why a person is wrong about something is that they were fated to be stupid by some cosmic accident. Either they were born that way or some unknown factors led to an unavoidable chance encounter. Nobody can change their nature and a person’s desire is only relevant when the stars align for it to come to the forefront. This line of thinking doesn’t really answer the question of morality, but it does replace Satan in explaining why people behave irrationally. Because I already valued truth, I decided that a reasonable person was someone who advanced the collective knowledge of humanity, and an evil person was someone who opposed this goal. When asked why (not that anyone would care enough to ask), I would explain that my brain structure and precise moment of birth, which then led to everything I had ever experienced in my life, left me no choice but to want to pursue that goal. Which is true to an extent. If you’ve seen the harm caused by moral relativism but you also don’t want to believe in God, this is your only real alternative. You can’t trace good and evil to God, so you have to attribute it to some flaw of the material world. But there’s nothing in the material world that can explain an effect with no cause; therefore, choices must be influenced by causes, therefore, they are not really choices. The two prior paragraphs of bleak atheist cope were my actual beliefs for seven years of my life. Can you imagine how I must have felt while believing all of this shit? Miserable. But that doesn’t mean it’s wrong, so let me explain why it is.

There is no material evidence of things existing outside of the material world, obviously. We can try to play philosophical games or use historical apologetics, but I find these arguments very unsatisfying for converting people. Apologetics are useful for proving that Christianity is the only true religion, but if you’ve been programmed to deny God’s existence altogether, some circumstantial evidence from 2,000 years ago won’t change your mind. What we have here are two conflicting and equally unprovable worldviews: the soul exists, and the soul doesn’t. If humans have souls, then Christianity must be true, given the historical evidence of the empty tomb. The evidence in the Bible is as good as the historical evidence for anything in that time period; the only reason to deny it is if you think the conclusions it leads to are impossible. If humans do not have souls, then my former deterministic worldview would have to be true. We can’t prove either claim. Redditors will say that “the burden of proof is on the positive claim,” but we are genuinely curious people and not pretentious neckbearded assholes, so we’re not going to dismiss the beliefs of billions of people with high school debate team logic. Instead, let’s evaluate these claims by which one leads to the most satisfying conclusions about the world around us.

Why did I convert to Christianity? Because my girlfriend (now fiancée) was Catholic and I thought that immersing myself in her religion would help me understand her better, even though I planned to still completely reject it in my heart. I figured I’d pick up some funny phrases or verses that I could say to impress her when she was upset. I was being a manipulative asshole, and I assumed it was okay because I thought that’s all religion was. Well, a thought struck me around day 3: “…Wait a minute. All of this shit is actually real.” All of the atheist cope washed away as soon as I actually listened to some Catholic arguments. I was watching “Symbolon” by the Augustine Institute for my OCIA. The worldview being presented to me wasn’t superstitious nonsense like I had assumed. It was simple; humans have souls, and once you accept that, everything else clicks. Suddenly it made sense why God allows bad things to happen and why He doesn’t heal every ailment. The reason why the world seems imperfect is that God is not a robot, He has a personality, and it’s okay if some people die unjustly because dying isn’t even close to the worst thing that could happen to someone. The Bible tells a story about a spiritual war that does a far better job explaining human behavior than science does. Ironically, believing in science requires far more faith than religion. Denying the existence of things outside of the material world forces you to believe that everything is an improbable coincidence. Given the supposed scale of the universe, could it be true? Sure. But religion provides a reason for everything and is better at predicting human behavior than psychology is. It’s not just about claiming “God’s plan is mysterious!” when literally anything happens; there are noticeable and common symptoms that occur in everyone whose life God is absent from. People aren’t animals following random programming. We are mysterious, irrational, and we crave and respond to things that have absolutely no evolutionary basis. I was completely set in my ways for seven years. I had no reason or desire to change. I had grown extremely skillful at explaining literally everything as “chemical reaction,” “human delusion,” “random mutation,” etc. But as soon as I opened my heart up in good faith, I was turned away. I didn’t even have a dramatic awakening and I didn’t need to contemplate it. It was like I just woke up from a dream, and I said to myself “man, what the fuck was I doing?”. I had been exposed to challenges against my views for years, and in stages of life when I was far less set in those views. Nothing evoked the immediate mental overhaul that Christianity did, as soon as I actually listened to Christians who were smart enough to articulate their faith.

So, if you’re an atheist like I was, and especially if you put as much thought into these matters as I do: turn away! Same goes if you just passively reject God and believe that life has no meaning. Atheism sucks. It’s a bad worldview. Its rise directly correlates with the decline of the world, and for good reason. Souls and free will are real. The world makes more sense if you believe in them. I can’t prove it to you; you’re just going to have to get your head out of your ass like I did, go to an OCIA program, and open your heart to the Church’s teachings instead of reflexively dismissing them because of your past experiences with mediocre preachers. Absorb the religion and you will immediately realize that it explains every aspect of the world with more accuracy than determinism, which is the logical endpoint of atheism. You’ll be so much happier, too! God rewarded me for my faith by giving me a wife and a son. He opened the hearts of my in-laws, who used to hate me. My mother-in-law accepted my proposal and she said I could call her “mom.” I was sent a new family to replace the one that I had a hand in destroying. It was like something out of a storybook. My son is a beautiful healthy fetus, even though my wife was on meds that scientifically should’ve spawncamped him and even though she believed for years that she was infertile. All of this has happened to me because I believe that God is real and that life has meaning. It’s beyond what could be explained by the placebo effect. If you don’t believe in souls, then you also can’t believe in love. The idea that love is “a chemical reaction” is retarded. Why would we “evolve” for our love to be so strong that it limits our fertility and kills us? The reason why it’s so strong is that our souls are oriented towards more than just survival. And once you accept SOMETHING spiritual is going on, every line of reasoning (historical evidence, which religion has persuaded the most souls, which religion has the most prosperous adherents, thousands of years of apologetics and theological debates) will invariably lead you to Christ. And once you allow the Holy Spirit to empower you, you’ll finally learn what it’s like to have control of your life.